Obama Outsources 100,000 More Jobs To Guest Workers

The administration will invite at least 100,000 extra foreign workers to win jobs in the U.S. over the next four years, according to a May 6 statement by Alejandro Mayorkas, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

The extra foreign workers will boost the resident population of graduate guest workers above 750,000. That’s almost as many jobs as the entire number of 842,000 blue-collar, white-collar and professional jobs that were gained from January to the end of April.

In June 2012, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama began granting work permits to young illegal immigrants. Since then, he has given work-permits to 521,815 illegal immigrants, who compete for the jobs sought by the 4 million Americans who turn 18 each year.

The May 6 announcement was slammed by Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is trying to highlight the impact of guest workers and large-scale immigration on American workers. “This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages,” said Sessions in a May 6 statement. “It is good news for citizens in other countries who will be hired… [but] for struggling Americans, it will only reduce wages, lower job opportunities, and make it harder to scrape by.”

Initially, the work permits will be given to roughly 97,000 spouses of graduate-level guest workers who are already in the United States on six-year work visas. Once the backlog is cleared, officials said they would award roughly 30,000 work-permits per year to the guest workers’ spouses.

The inflow of 30,000 extra workers will add to “the existing annual [arrival] of approximately 700,000 [short-term] guest workers and 1 million new permanent immigrant admissions,” said Sessions’ statement.

Only about 50,000 of each year’s supply of guest workers are employed in agriculture. The remaining 650,000 are employed work in a wide variety of short-term or multi-year jobs in areas such as retail, landscaping, fish-processing, and professional services.

Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, estimates that there are roughly 650,000 university-trained guest workers with long-term visas who are resident in the country. That’s almost as many as the 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in such as areas as engineering, business, accounting, medicine and software.